


Home By Nightfall

by macabre



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012), The Collector (2009)
Genre: AU, Crossover, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Breakdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 01:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU/Crossover of Josh Stewart's character from the Collector and the Dark Knight Rises. Barsad was a given name, a taken name, forged by a house of horror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home By Nightfall

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [kaszz_chan](http://kaszz-chan.livejournal.com/) for her prompt at the Dark Knight Rises Anonymous Kink Meme [here](http://tdkr-kink.livejournal.com/2798.html?thread=1258222#t1958894).

He wakes up with surprisingly white bandages compared to the dingy room he’s lying in. The walls are an astonishing array of off-whites with stains on top of stains. He doesn’t know this room, but there’s sunlight from the window falling on him that lets him know he’s on the west side of a building and it’s evening. He tries to keep his mind clear while his heart pounds everywhere – chest, head, appendages. 

He glances at his chest: bandages. A hospital applies bandages. This clearly isn’t a hospital though.

There was a house, not his, that he knew. Knew so well for his own purposes that it ultimately became both his salvation and damnation. He’d rather not be in any house right now, but outside somewhere in the open. Somewhere were wires can’t be tripped or where traps are easy to see.

Arkin doesn’t see anything in this room to trip. In fact, it’s completely bare from what he can see on his back. He’s too sore to move much, but the adrenaline is starting to pump. He won’t sit here. He has to get up. He’s on a bare mattress, also stained, but otherwise it’s just hardwood floor. Old hardwood floor, the kind that will creak horribly as soon as he moves a muscle. 

And he’s afraid to. Move, and the floorboards will creak. He’ll draw attention to himself, and all he can think about is a black mask, forget the face underneath. If one night in the horror house taught him anything, it’s that staying still and lying low isn’t enough. He has to get up. He has to run. 

The bandages around his middle are so tight he can barely breath, let alone pull himself up delicately. Cockroaches. He remembers them, corralled into his skin under a flame. He’s almost sick all over himself, but he has the last of the day’s light to comfort him. He’s lived to see this. He closes his eyes, still feels the sun on his face, and pushes himself up. There are no cockroaches here. 

Gritting his teeth over a groan, he clutches at his stomach, then holds his hand up to his face. His fingers, which were cut to the bone at the razored window, are wrapped into a useless blunt end. Panicked, he tries to wiggle his fingers, make sure they’re still there, and yes, he can feel them, just as badly as the rest of his body. Everything hurts, everything flares up in agitation. 

Walk to the window. See the exterior: brick walls with fire escapes across from him. An apartment building of some kind. Stands to chance that he’s in an apartment building too then, in an area that – that doesn’t look familiar at all. If he cranes his neck as far as possible, he sees city streets. They don’t even look American. 

Heart ratcheting to an all time high since consciousness, Arkin looks over the window for wires, razors, anything. It’s nailed shut, but it’s so obviously done that it must be a joke for something far deadlier somewhere. He’s contemplating testing it somehow when he hears the movements outside his door. On his tip-toes, he moves beside the door as quietly as possible. There are only two options left now: try the window or rush whoever it is outside the door and hope he can outrun him. 

He’s already moved away from the window, so there’s really only one option. As the doorknob rattles, he bursts through it will all his strength. The door snaps, the person behind it falling backwards. Arkin doesn’t even glance at whoever it is – masked man or child or anyone – he just runs. 

What this building is he isn’t sure – there are large hallways with many rooms. Doors open, doors closed. All empty. He doesn’t see knives hanging from the ceilings or bear traps on the floor. He sees only an open, gutted building, devoid of anything living or dead. 

He finds stairs and mostly falls down them. Hobbles to his feet and runs down another hallway. There’s a door. A door with an unlit exit sign, long forgotten it’s glow. Arkin pushes himself towards the door, his shambling gait smoothing out with flight instincts.

The light of the evening sun at the edge of the door flickers, almost blinding him, until all he can see is the bulk of a man in front of it. A big man. A strong man. A masked man. 

There is screaming, it’s tearing his throat out. The mask gets closer and closer, because he’s never stopped running, he realizes. He stops all at once and falls to the ground, right at the man’s feet. The mask approaches slowly, taking his time, and Arkin is sure he’s going to die right here, and this time, in this empty building with everywhere to run, he can’t. Did he ever stand a chance?

The man strolls towards him, all grace and leisure. Nothing rushed. Nothing frantic or deadly. It’s then that Arkin sees him – sees a man in a mask, but not a black mask, a metal one, with teeth and leather. Hands tucked into the neck of his shirt. Weaponless. He crouches down in front of Arkin, his eyes clear and light colored. 

_“And where do you think you are going, Mr. Arkin?”_ The voice is almost monstrous, but the mask, even as it dominates his face, is not the mask of the madman he knew.

 

 

 

The mask changes his bandages daily, always at the same time, in the same place. Even though he won’t tell him where they are or what the building is exactly, all of the rooms are empty, yet Arkin stays in the one he puts him in without being explicitly told not to leave. He wanders the halls a bit from time-to-time, but mostly he lies down without sleep because this man encourages him to rest by silently pushing him into the bed. He brings him food, new clothes, pain meds. He doesn’t say anything, but Arkin adjusts to the silence.

It’s hard after a lifetime of taking orders, a bad marriage, and a stint in prison. That part is easy to forget. What can’t be forgotten is the house of horror, the way his ex-employer looked strung up, insides outside. His beautiful wife with her horrendously large lips sewn shut. Their teenage daughter flung up against a wall of knives. Their youngest…he doesn’t want to think about her anymore. She’s not his concern. Never was. 

In the silence, he doesn’t know what to do. He hears creaking floors and shudders. The wail of an opening door and he hides. The stop and start of footsteps and he cries. 

It’s always the mask. For all he knows, they are the only two people in the entire building now despite the person he ran over the first day, but nothing sooths him. He can’t eat. Can’t sleep, no matter the drugs the man tries to slip him. He smells gasoline in the floors. This building will burn too. The flies and bugs gather around him and won’t leave him alone. He develops a tick in his neck; he feels the roaches there. They want to crawl in his skin and be him, eat him.

He leaves his room. Walks down the hall, one hand on the sides. To support himself? To feel for discrepancies. For the warning before the fire, the knife, the bullet. The masked man finds him. Not the same masked man. The right masked man. He screams when he touches him, but it’s futile to resist. He’s weak, and the man impossibly strong. He lifts him like a child – like he did Hannah – and carries him to a new room.

This room is one of the larger ones, another mattress on the floor, but accompanied by a table and boxed crates. There are tubes and vials of things on that table, things Arkin doesn’t want to see or be near. The man closes the door and drops him on the mattress. Arkin squirms into the corner, a solid weight on his back. No surprises here, not with his back against a wall.

The man changes his bandages in this room instead of Arkin’s. He makes him lie down here. Arkin has found his new prison, and it’s not a house but a room. The mask stays in the room with him always. His breathing never strays, always the same, never speeds up or down. 

His breathing becomes Arkin’s first comfort. The metallic rasp in it, inhuman when his first captor was so plainly human. He lets it pull his thoughts in, then his body. He lets this man sit close to him, even crawls to his side sometimes. The things on the table, the chemicals – they are for his mask. They aren’t for Arkin at all. He watches the way the man mixes them and swirls them into vapors. Deposits them in the metal teeth of his mask.

One day, Arkin even takes the small cylinder from him. The mask lets him, watches him, and that’s when this man’s eyes become his next comfort. There are more to them than the man in black ever showed. These eyes show him everything – anger and kindness. He lets Arkin change the vapors in his mask, just the same as Arkin lets him check his wounds, no longer inhibited by bandages.

That night, the man lies down with him on the mattress. The breathing magnified in his ears sings him to sleep, a deep sleep, a good sleep, for the first time since his nightmare began. When he wakes, the man has his injured hand in both of his. The scar across his fingers is ugly and dark. He will never do anything – not write, nor reach for something, nor shake a hand – without seeing that scar and remembering.

Arkin rips it out of the man’s hand and turns onto his side to hide his tears. The mask shifts; Arkin tenses out of habit. One thick arm is enough to move him – right into the man’s lap. The other hand curls upwards – Arkin’s neck ticks, he’s going to curl that hand around his throat, he knows it – and strays into his hair. The hand just sits there, just as Arkin just sits in the massive man’s lap, back to his front, with one hand wrapped around his waist. 

Is this comfort? Arkin still cries, and the man still says nothing.

 

 

_“The time has come.”_ It’s been so long since he’s heard that voice, he began to think he dreamt it. Arkin blinks awake from his distressed sleep to look at him. He’s lying next to him, like they’ve done every night for some time now. Those are the arms that grip him when he cries, and release him when he screams.

_”You have healed, and so our journey begins._

He doesn’t even remember the right words anymore. He watches the man stand and stretch. 

_”Rise, brother._

Arkin does. He watches the man cloth himself in heavy boots and some kind of protective vest. He lets the other man dress him too, dress him like they’re going off to war, but Arkin’s been at war before. He shudders in the man’s hands. He tries to sink back down to the ground, but the man won’t let him.

_”You have suffered much, much more than most men, and in many ways this will be your greatest lesson, but there is more for you._ He tells him his name: Bane. It disarms Arkin to finally know. There is a mask. Masks should never have names. To give them names is to name nightmares too. 

_”I have healed your body, and now I shall heal your soul by offering you justice._ He packs his chemicals, his vials and his tubes. He’s leaving, Arkin realizes. Panic grips him; he collapses to the floor without his tree to shelter him. His tree has bodies hanging off of it; he sees it, he does not ask. He doesn’t want to know.

_”I shall give you the means to take justice from the man who hurt you and has killed others, but you must rise, brother.”_

He doesn’t know why this man wears a mask, but it’s not to hide anything. This mask saves. He saves him. The floors still shake, and the doors still whine, but Arkin stays next to the man with the metallic breathing. He is inhuman, something more, something to watch him in the darkest nights. 

”We shall start a fire, then,” Arkin says. Gasoline. Gasoline everywhere. He still smells it, faintly, hidden within these walls. 

_”The fire rises.”_ Bane moves in front of him, watching. Waiting. Arkin stands, on his own. On his mangled fingers. When he looks down at them, he sees the dark night outside a window, and a man in a black mask. 

But there are other masks, he learns. Ones that slip on without thought. Ones built in fumes and vapors. 

_”You come with me, I shall give you what you seek, but you must pay a price._ A pause, filled with the rasp of the intake of his breath, faint. Comforting. Arkin doesn’t have to ask what the price is. 

_”You are mine now.”_ Stated clearly, no doubts or question to it. Did he have a choice? What would he choose, now that all he has are these masks?

“I don’t – “ know. What to do. There are still roaches. His neck ticks. The floors seem to shift under his feet. He wants to hide still, sheltered by the man’s shade. 

“I saw his face.”

_”People only take notice when others put on the mask._ Bane grips his arm, hard. _”You must shed your old identity for a new one. One that will mold you. You must make your own mask._

“He must have a new name.” 

Arkin whirls around; there was no creaking floor or whining door. No wires tripped. No warning. Just an intruder, so silent, so deadly. She’s slight, but seems to take up the entire room as she walks through it. She smiles at him, a hand touching his cheek.

“Barsad. The man who survived the black collector. That’s what you are – a survivor.” Her eyes are bluer than Bane’s – lovely, and cold. Arkin shifts towards Bane, his tree. Bane is the outdoors after being locked inside for so long. A tree. Its shade. He is the daylight and the air he breathes.

A giant, warm hand grasps him and pulls him to a steadily breathing set of lungs. There is a rasp in his ear, steady, constant. Never faltering, never changing. 

Things sometimes prosper in the shadows better than they do in the daylight.


End file.
